Combustible Celluloid's Guide to Cult Movies and Cult Films

Always Intense

What is a cult
movie? A cult movie is a movie that earns a fanatical following by a small group
of people. It's also a movie that bears watching many, many times and contains
memorable, repeatable dialogue. Cult movies are preferably made socially
unacceptable ingredients, such as horror, sex, violence, or science fiction.

Some movies, like Star Wars and Casablanca have devoted
followings, but those are considered too large for cult status. The main idea is
that we love our cult movies specifically because we know that most people
don't.

The following are cult films endorsed by Combustible Celluloid. I've seen
these movies over and over in the theater and on video. They are films
that I know well enough to play in my head. But they are films without which I
might just perish were I on a desert island.

Please keep checking back. This page will be updated from time to time. (Latest additions: Attack the Block, Breathless,
Clue, Hellraiser, The Shooting, Suspiria,
The Tall T, They Live, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, The Virgin Suicides. Current count: 78.)

The feature directing debut by Joe Cornish, this alien invasion movie stood two heads and shoulders above an onslaught of brain-dead movies in the same genre,
managing to feel fresh and clever, and worth re-watching.

Frank Henelotter's amazing low-budget splatter comedy showcases Siamese twin brothers -- one normal, the other a squishy little beast who lives in a basket -- searching for revenge on the New York doctors who separated them.

This mind-blowing Japanese film is endlessly entertaining, by turns gory and hilarious, disturbing and exciting. The great Japanese exploitation filmmaker Kinji Fukasaku (The Green Slime, Yakuza Graveyard) was nearly seventy when he made this masterpiece, and it turned out to be his final completed film. With "Beat" Takeshi Kitano.

Any of the Coen Brothers' films could qualify as cult classics, but this one is both the most underappreciated and has the most fanatical following. That's mostly thanks to Jeff Bridges' brilliantly laid-back performance as The Dude. "That rug really tied the room together..."

Black Sunday (a.k.a. The Mask of Satan) stars Barbara Steele as a resurrected witch and her modern-day double. It was Mario Bava's first film as director and a huge hit for distributor American International Pictures.

David Lynch's brightly colored suburban horror show peels away America's facade and revels in the dark sex we like to imagine that we don't think about. With Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper.

Terry Gilliam's futuristic comedy squeezes the life out of the world and builds it into higher and higher vertical towers. Jonathan Pryce plays the everyman whose life is changed by some bungled paperwork.

The greatest documentary ever made, Terry Zwigoff's film gets to the soul of its fascinating subject, and the underground
nature of Crumb's art makes this a compulsively watchable, irreverent cult classic.

Based on an Italian comic book (or "fumetti"), this Mario Bava crime thriller has never enjoyed the devotion of Bava's horror films. John Phillip Law plays the title character, a master criminal with an underground lair and a sexy, blond girlfriend (Marisa Mell).

Set at a shopping mall and with as much to say about mindless consumerism as about eating brains, George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead is still just as scary and just as relevant (more so than the remake). Romero spends no time explaining the zombie situation and gets right to the heart of the story.

Richard Kelly makes an incredible directorial debut with this sci-fi, horror, coming-of-age tale of a poor schizophrenic (Jake Gyllenhal) who, with the help of with a giant demonic rabbit, glimpses a vision of a terrible future. Drew Barrymore and Patrick Swayze are very good in supporting roles.

John Waters fans might argue over whether the earlier films are better than the more recent ones, but the truth is that any Waters film qualifes as a cult classic. Female Trouble is one of the funniest and most outrageous, with Divine playing the petulant Dawn Davenport. "I hate you and I hate Christmas!"

In order to save their town from developers, a group of rowdy kids pins all their hopes on finding an old pirate treasure supposedly hidden nearby. A little like an "Indiana Jones Junior," The Goonies has recently become a cult item among Gen Xers, who fondly remember the film from their childhood or teen years.

One of the greatest of all films, this "B" movie classic has it all. In telling his story of two lovers on the run, director Joseph H. Lewis uses a startling immediacy not found in any other films at the time.

John Cameron Mitchell's rock 'n' roll movie that remembers what it's like to truly rock and roll. The flashing colors, sounds, music, humor, and cartoons all congeal into a perfect, clear vision of passionate joy.

Horror legend Clive Barker made a striking directorial debut with this grisly tale of the depths of human lust and avarice, featuring some of the most unforgettably
grotesque imagery ever to grace a terror film.

One of Nicholas Ray's best films, this garish, amazing, weird,
full-color Freudian Western stars Joan Crawford at her finest.
She plays Vienna, a saloon-keeper who goes head-to-head with
the unstable, shrieking cattle rancher Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge).

With The Killer, John Woo resurrected the action film, which had been languishing in the 1980s
with a series of Rambo clones. It's Woo's
action that sets this film apart. Remarkably fluid and clear, his camera
swings and pans in rhythm with the actors' movements; candles and
pigeons add a symbolic, spiritual weight to the proceedings. With Chow Yun-fat and Danny Lee.

This strange, cool, beautiful Swedish vampire film from director Tomas Alfredson practically re-invented the subgenre; oddly, it opened in the U.S. the same day as Twilight, but true genre
fans knew which one to see.

To portray a man with no short-term memory, director Christopher Nolan very simply lays out his film in reverse, so that we have no idea what happened just moments before. Bottle-blond Guy Pearce plays the lead role, a man hunting for his wife's killer using only Polaroids and other clues he leaves for himself. Joe Pantoliano and Carrie Anne Moss co-star.

Endlessly quotable, guaranteed to make you laugh until you're breathless, this ramshackle comedy from five Brits and one American not only endures, but it
launched the awesome directing career of Terry Gilliam.

David Cronenberg's brilliant adaptation of an unadaptable novel by William S. Burroughs. Peter Weller inhabits the persona of the junkie writer stuck in the Interzone with a talking bug typewriter. With Judy Davis, Roy Scheider, Julian Sands and Ian Holm.

In Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break a young FBI agent (Keanu
Reeves) goes undercover as a surfer to catch a
band of bank robbers who dress up as U.S presidents. But
he becomes involved with the spirituality of
surfing, as preached by the gang's leader (Patrick Swayze).
Bigelow has a great eye
not only for action, but also for the psychological push and pull behind it.

Alex Cox's punk comedy follows a young repo man (Emilio Estevez) who learns the Meaning of Life from the master Harry Dean Stanton as they hunt for a $20,000 Chevy Malibu with some dead aliens hidden in the trunk.

Quentin Tarantino came out of nowhere with one of the most astonishing, explosive of American debut films, even if it only played to small, enthusiastic crowds in art houses. His use of sleight-of-hand and low-budget ingenuity is still impressive, as is the breakfast table opener.

George Miller's fuel-injected futuristic car movie features Mel Gibson as a leather-clad badass who cruises the highways in search of gasoline, occasionally battling with freaks of all shapes and sizes.

Allan Arkush's teen comedy features the greatest rock band of all time, the Ramones, inspiring students like Riff Randell (P.J. Soles) to take over the high school. (Co-written by Joe Dante and Joseph McBride.)

Jason Schwartzman stretches himself a little too thin while attending Rushmore, including a helpless crush on a beautiful teacher (Olivia Williams) and a friendship with an inconsolably sad entrepreneur (Bill Murray in one of his greatest performances). Every quirky move and every deadpan line reading just zings.

This is no mere movie that's comfortable finding a couple of camera angles to depict a scene. In this movie, the camera shifts and darts, sets expand and switch around, time jumps back and forth, moments melt into one another, and graphics appear onscreen to highlight it all. Directed by Edgar Wright.

Edgar Wright directs this spot-on zombie comedy, which spends more time setting up a sense of place, developing characters and creating brilliant jokes than on zombie effects and gore. Star Simon Pegg co-wrote the screenplay.

This is a true masterpiece of the unrest of the 1960s, years before Easy Rider or anything else remotely like it, going into crazy, angry places and finishing up as one of Samuel Fuller's greatest works.

Director Monte Hellman uses the desert landscape to play havoc between this "existential Western's" four extreme personalities, clashing them against one another in every conceivable way. The shocking, baffling ending provides the "existential" part.

Dario Argento's best-known film is a Cinemascope, pinwheel lollipop-colored spin through a haunted German dance academy. Fresh blood Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper) checks in, and before long notices odd activities and behavior around the prestigious school...

Based on an early short story by Elmore Leonard, The Tall T is
one of the seven excellent "B" Westerns made between 1956 and 1960 by
director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott, making masterful use of its rocky
terrain, and a dark cave.

From the startling opening sequence with its popping flashbulbs to the jarring finale (mixing Marilyn Burns' blood-curdling screams with the sound of the chainsaw), it's an incredible piece of work. Director Tobe Hooper uses broad daylight to matter-of-factly show horrors that earlier films kept in the shadows and darkness.

John Carpenter's post-apocalyptic sci-fi-action-comedy masterpiece was a dark, vicious look at the Reagan era, but its dystopian vision still applies today. The movie
also contains one of the most quotable lines of dialogue in history.

Lloyd Kaufman and Troma Entertainment had their breakthrough film and their all-time high point with this willfully stupid superhero spoof. The movie is cheerfully, unrelentingly over-the-top, filled with disgusting gore, language, and sex, with nothing deemed too awful or offensive for the final cut.

Eli Craig's movie has a simple, ingenious idea: Why are hillbillies always so nasty and evil in horror movies? What if they're really good folks, and the college students are the awful ones? The movie takes this idea and runs all the way with it.

This one counts because a slightly re-edited version of the two-hour pilot was shown theatrically in Japan. Aside from that,
David Lynch's majestic, amazing TV series was as cinematic as anything else going on in the early 1990s. See also Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

Adapted and directed by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is based on the book by Jeffrey Eugenides about five lovely and mysterious blonde girls in the suburbs of the 1970s, over the course of one troubled, tender, unforgettable year.

In a kind of bizarro New York, an innocent gang tries to get back across the city to Coney Island after being wrongly accused of murder; along the way, every other gang in the city, each with its own costume and motif, tries to kill them. Walter Hill directs this energetic, unforgettable work.

Edward Woodward plays a puritan cop who arrives on a remote island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl, but the townspeople seem to know nothing about it. This brilliantly unfolds in perfectly sculpted waves and including fascinating subtexts.